Bye-Bye, Robot!

One aspect of rendering a shot, that is easy to overlook, is making space for the dialogue. An example of that occurred last night while I was working on page 5. Featured in the panel were Tagus and Lt. Burke (in the foreground) and a woman and a robot (in the background). At the time of the render, I did think about where the dialogue balloon would go, but I felt that there was enough space. However, after the render had been done and I was adding dialogue in Photoshop, it became apparent that there was simply too much text and I had to make more space. To do that, I needed to cover up most of the robot with the dialogue balloon. Since it’s considered bad form to cover a character like that, even if it’s in the background, I decided to do some Photoshop magic and “erase” the robot entirely. This is fairly easy to do: basically, I use the Clone brush to copy the areas around where the robot is standing. It was a little tricky in this case because the surrounding scene (a wall) had some designs on it which would look disjointed if I didn’t take care. After about 10-15 minutes, however, it was as if the robot had never been there. Sorry, robot!